Time.news – The phone rings. “Dimitri, is that you? Yeeeee… it’s me, Harry. I know it’s a hell of an hour there in Moscow, but it’s… how to say… it’s that one of our guys has a snitch shot… Yes, a general. Now he wants to attack you with our missiles, and we don’t know how to stop him ”.
Splendor and misery of the Superpowers, when you were still there, the Cold War.
Hard times yet we persist in dreaming of them, in this chaos of ungovernable polycentrisms into which our old world has transformed. Nothing was more comfortable than when they were there, the Superpowers, to think of everything, and the rest of us Europeans would put butter on bread – the others thought about the guns. And we could afford everything, even to have a large Communist Party in our home and to be in NATO at the same time.
Basically everything was born from that: a telephone (or something similar, a network of contacts and ultra-private communications) that extended life. It started from the Oval Office, crossed the oceans and climbed the mountains, did not stop in front of the plains and marshes, and in just under a second it arrived in the Sala di San Giorgio. And there Dimitri, or whoever he was, was ready to hear an embarrassed Harry warning him: one of ours, a four-star general named Ripper, had the snitch turned. Otherwise, moral of history, we all end up in glory.
And go like this, Doctor Strangelove: say bunkers built in silence and eugenic projects which started from an assumption that sexist is an understatement. This: every man, ten women available. Other than Mee Too.
If this has not happened, it is known, it is thanks to the Red Line between the United States and the United States. The two contenders established it, by mutual agreement, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when it was really feared, for 13 days, of having reached Armageddon. Kennedy was young, but not reckless. Khrushchev a convinced Communist, but not a foolish one. It was the moment when the rules of the game were finally established.
These: no holds barred blows but, if the game is likely to get out of hand, time-out and it comes.
The power of a fax
It was established, it was said, one day in June 1963. It is not known how many times it was actually used, but we can assume many for Vietnam as for Euromissiles, for Yom Kippur as well as for the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, here there is a certainty: there are the transcriptions of the conversations, which testify that Bush was surprised as much as Gorbachev. By dint of putting butter on bread, the Germans had also stolen the guns.
In 1956, when he still wasn’t there and the French and the British were playing colonial powers by occupying the Suez Canal, his absence was felt, but this did not prevent Moscow and Washington from agreeing to block each his: the aforementioned French and English, but also the Israelis, for America; Sadat and the Arab masses just voted to socialism for the USSR. Be good if you can: there is a revolt in Hungary. Maybe you could do without it, but having it certainly didn’t complicate things.
The memorandum that created it was signed in Geneva, the city that now hosts the summit between Biden and Putin. On closer inspection, little has changed since the times of the Empire of Evil: they too have said all kinds of things, but basically they have the common goal of keeping China good.
All the devilry of science and technology available moment by moment were devoted to the cause of peace. It started with eight teletypewriters, four on each side, writing at a strange speed calculated in baud. In 1988 a fax was placed. Even. In 2008 a satellite and a fiber optic cable. Since then, however, someone has come up with the G5 and it is questionable how to guarantee privacy even at that level. Fishing is always around the corner. Perhaps the carrier pigeon is safer.
© ROBERT L. KNUDSEN / ROBERT L. KNUDSEN – WHITE HOUSE / DPA PICTURE-ALLIANCE
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
It is said that the phone as such would have been avoided on purpose: texts remain, and then speech is easier to misunderstand. If so, Kubrick was completely wrong: he translated into Russian, giving the sense of the tragic moment, phrases such as “the snitch turned to him”. It is also true, then, that the paper had helped to resolve the Cuban missile crisis.
At one point Khrushchev had sent a relaxing message, the Central Committee of the CPSU a bellicose one; Kennedy didn’t know which way to turn. His brother Bob whispered in his ear, who must have been a Tigellin but that time he took us fully and we must be grateful to him also in the name of our descendants: “Just consider what suits you most.” Jack the Wise chose the first, and it was peace.
There is nothing healthier than a good fist fight, if you know that in the end you don’t get hurt.
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